'Dune Part Two' is Another Incredible Spectacle
Denis Villeneuve cements his place as the best setpiece designer of his generation, but raises more questions about his grasp of story.
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Let’s do the snaaaaake dance agaaaaaaiiiinnn….
It’s hard to know what to make of the tremendously entertaining Dune: Part Two, which feels simultaneously like the best movie I’ve seen in years and not quite a movie. Dune was a suitably epic, transporting exercise in world building that, even if it stopped short of offering any kind of conclusion, at least had clearly drawn battle lines. Part Two once again feels massive, epic, fully-realized — all the usual adjectives we want from blockbuster sci-fi. See it on the biggest screen possible!
Like its predecessor, Part Two feels like it’s marching towards an epic denouement that it ends up deferring to some future sequel. Yet where Dune left me itching to see the next chapter, Dune: Part Two had me feeling more conflicted. It’s not that it needed to tell us who to root for, but I did start wondering what they were fighting about. While it’s almost impossible to imagine a better way to spend two hours and 46 minutes (that it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long is another point in its favor), the stakes have gotten muddled.
The best thing about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune series is that it made me feel the way Gen Xers say seeing Star Wars for the first time made them feel. They’re both rousing sci-fi swashbucklers full of sword fights, exotic aliens, and sexy heroes that let you nerd out on as much lore-slop as your piggy snout can stand. Yet on a basic level, Star Wars feels like baby food Dune. The Empire is evil, the Rebels are good, there’s a Dark Side and Jedis, and it all works well enough, but the strokes seem broad and deliberately digestible, like it didn’t trust us with specific conflicts or nuanced morality.
Dune, meanwhile, (which Star Wars had been accused of ripping off long before this Villeneuve iteration) had spice. The houses fought over the spice because it was necessary for interstellar travel, and the Fremen, who lived on the desert planet of Arrakis where spice was mined, were caught in the middle. The story was still fantastical and simplistic in some ways, but the characters were fighting over material conditions. If Star Wars gave us clashes between “Light” and “Dark,” that was the stuff of simplistic war propaganda, Dune was about colonial subjugation and battles to control precious resources, the stuff wars are actually fought over.